My first game jam... atleast I will be able to finish the game. Now, just the powerups remaining. This is how "Island Guard" looks now:

Finished the snow globe creation menu

It's been almost a decade since I built a crappy little side-scroller shoot-em-up called Paint Rider. That was the first game I ever made. Paint Rider was made back in college on what would have been a particularly uneventful Spring Break. I was too broke to go anywhere and too stir-crazy to not do anything, so while my friends were off at Panama Beach, Cancun, and Cabo San Lucas, I was holed up in my shabby 1-bedroom duplex apartment, learning how to create a video game.

In many ways, that Spring Break was my first Game Jam. I had one week to build a game start to finish, using only the resources I had readily available (which back then, wasn't much, seriously, I don't think a lot of programmers understand how much tools like Unity has sped up the process). Building game was completely new to me, I ended up learning a lot about games, but even more about programming. I don't know if I still have the source code for Paint Rider, but I've definitely retained the experience.

Jump to 2017, I had been wanting to get back to those roots. I needed a break from the daily grind of professional programming and wanted to do something fun. Like a lighthouse beckoning from a distant shore, I saw the announcement for Ludum Dare 38 the Monday before the event. I was saved. I immediately signed-up.

What Went Right:

Twitch Stream - I ended up streaming the whole weekend and it was a ton of fun. The first night, I got some really great theme ideas from Twitch chat and ended up going with a theme of scaling and puzzles. We began brainstorming more about the general idea and came up with a game where you (the player) could scale themselves or the object/surroundings. Due to time constraints, only the object scaling was developed, and it ended up being a pretty neat concept came.

Theme Choice - The third-round theme votes were already going on when I signed up. I originally wanted something darker in-theme, up-voting "Death is only the beginning" and "Reincarnation". I had a good idea for a Lovecraftian themed city-management game where you were the mayor of a town that had to sacrifice "tourists" without getting caught. Was a goo idea, and I may re-visit it, but when the theme of "A Small World" was announce I was taken aback. I didn't plan on anything around that theme, which in hindsight, was probably a good thing because I ended up with two game ideas.

What Went Wrong:

Art and Assets - I'm not a * great * artist, at not least digitally. You give me some paper and an ink pen, I can make some really great drawings, but I'm crap when it comes to 3D or digital art. So, with the exception of the main "Win Cube" (more on that below), most of the assets came out plan and geometric. Also, because I was streaming the whole Jam, a lot of viewers really wanted to help me with the project. They wanted to build art and assets for me and get involved in the Jam. However, because I wanted to do the compo, I was forced to tell off quite a few people (with the exception of Retrio2054, maker of the "WinCube"). I'm thinking now it will by fun next time to do the 72-hour with a team of people and create a really fun and good-looking game.

Compo Rules - As I said before, I ended up using Retrio's 3D model for the final build. I didn't have a clear understanding that I had to work solo for the compo and I loved the look of the model so much I had to add it. However, since it was added last minute, I've opted the game out of any graphics prizes. Since it's only one asset, hopefully, I am still able to submit as Compo without being DQ'd.

Closing thoughts

Game Jams are fun, and this one has taken me back to that college Spring Break. I had the most fun brainstorming with the 20-something viewers on Twitch, all bustling and churning with ideas for a game. I think now I will continue Game Dev streaming, which allows me to do something creative and fun with my free-time, something which I was seriously lacking. I hope I get to do more jams moving forward. Everyday I've been waiting in anticipation on a ticket announcement for next year's Train Jam. I'll definitely be streaming Ludum Dare 39.

Thanks everyone for your support.

Twitch Stream

Play SmlWhrld

Four hours of sleep is enough, right?

Normally, I'd say no. Except I have to work all day today, which would leave me maybe an hour for last minute polishing before the deadline. Knowing myself, probably not gonna happen, so I'm calling DNAPet done.

It's...playable. There's a lot of balancing that needs to be done. There are effectively no animations, just simple coded things like flipping sprites to keep it from being toooo static. But there's simple sound effects. And background music! I've definitely learned a lot with this project, and really that's why we do these things, right?.

Need to write a proper post-event blog entry. The good, the bad, the new. Later though. Hoping to carry this motivation into the other projects I have in the works too.

In the meantime, DNAPet is "done" and ready to be played.

My first LD over and done with, and i think it went pretty decently, despite a general lack of sleep this weekend. There were a few starting hiccoughs including an unsaved unity scene that went tits up (noobtip: don't remove a canvas object while the game is running)

All in all, while the game itself isn't the most amazing thing ever, it has a concept, with just enough depth and strategy, and truth be told most of it just kind of fell into place as i created. I had very little in mind before I started developing. Unfortunately the code bears the marks of this, and is an unstructured mess, even for unity standards.

The Art assets are fairly simple, but some of the details didn't scale well, so I definitely could improve those, and there's some layering issues on some of the tiles.

The primary takeaway from this I think, is more planning and stucture for the next time, but all in all the experience was quite enjoyable!

See you all for the next one!

So we tried to do something new this time and go for an atmospheric story thing, instead of the usual arcade/puzzle games we do for jams. Pretty happy with how it came about - I think we nailed the atmosphere we were going for. Would love to work on it some more, but office beckons.

Meanwhile, here's an end of the world gif from the game:

Link: Glass Houses

Will do a full post-mortem later. (Record for least number of bugs in any of our jam entries!... I think)

Can't wait till the site is updated to start playing other games!

I'm still finishing some details, polishing art and gameplay.

The final result will probably me messy, since it's really hard to balance a strategy game in less than one day.

The cube thing will probably not work 100%, because of limitations of using phaser, and my own fault for taking this weird direction.

Hi guys, i'm back ! I just publishing this post to tell you guys I have made some Updates in my Game. Some Players told me that they haved some troubles to proceed with the game.

So I added some things to make my game more compreensive and playable.

If you find some bugs, or anything like that, pls let your comment in this post. Doing this, you will help me to let my game more cool than before.

Thanks for all who played my game and helping me.

link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$16811 :joystick:

Hey folks! :hand_splayed:

We're running the stream on Facebook from our real world gathering in Minsk :flag_by:

CHECK THE LINK: https://goo.gl/nE5SAk

i made boss batle, now there were only simple things left

Managed to crash Unity completely.

So the project is coming along, but guess we are out of submission entry this time. We definitely progressed quite a lot over this weekend but still far away from finishing due to unforeseen circumstances.

LD was a fun time to enter and compete, but sill much must be done and also study some more.

Cheers everyone.

p.s: Lots of interesting projects bookmarked will try them out.

Hackathon donts: a major rework a few hours before the end😂😂 I wasn't happy with the composition of this scene, plus we polished the graphics a little more... it actually improves the overall player experience, filling the quality gap we had between our 2 gameplays.

I took part in the Jam and in doing so I created a full game for the first time! Here it is.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-glass-marble-tour

It's a simple game about two people wandering around, well, a small world.

This was my fourth LD, and my 3rd time doing the compo. Overall I think things went well, though there definitely were issues (forgetting how Unity does assets...).

What went well:
I ended up primarily putting together pieces of what I've learned from other LDs and coding I've done between jams for this game and building off of them. As a result, I didn't need to spend too much time learning how to use completely new features in Unity and had a playable after only about 10 hours of work. This allowed me to have much more time to polish up the UI and balance the game. I ended up attempting to implement some of the ideas I'd gotten from reading some game dev articles about creating difficult decisions for the player and building a framework for the player to build a story on. I think that overall I succeeded at that, though (as with any game made over a weekend) more balancing would undoubtedly be beneficial.

What could have gone better:
I am slightly disappointed that I didn't really get to learn a major new system this time (Though since I also had other events happening this weekend and eating into my LD time, maybe it was a good thing). Specifically, I would have liked to try to get sound working for my game; I think it would have added a lot. If I do continue working on the game (and I hope to) sound will likely be one of the first things I try to implement. As far as specific errors I had trouble with, the biggest one was Unity's way of doing assets. If you want to read from text files, you need to specifically add them into your built project after the fact; they don't get included when Unity builds the project. There also were a couple instances where reversing the order in which I called some functions fixed a bug and I definitely don't know how. Other than that, it was mostly just general bug fixes.

Takeaway:
If you can, adding sound makes everything better. Other than that, getting a couple people other than yourself to try playing the game is immensely helpful. Not only do they find bugs you may not have found because you already "know" how to play the game, but it can also help show you what may not be clear to a player just starting the game.

If you want to give my game a shot here's a link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$18756

Hi all! Love apple games is in for the jam! Team members: Boris, Val.

Tools:

• jgame.js (http://www.13thmonkey.org/~boris/jgame.js/) for coding
• tiny sprite editor, evolvotron for graphics (http://tmtg.net/tinyspriteeditor/)
• Audacity, jfxr for sound

Hey I forgot the blog was a thing! But yeah we're making good progress with our game. It's nearly done! We hope that you will all enjoy playing it at the end of the jam.

Cheers! -Stuck in a Lift Studios